3. Imagined Communities of the Living and the Dead: The Spread of the Ancestor-Venerating Stem Family in Tokugawa Japan

Abstract

O-Dai pushed aside the lamplet and the incense-cup and the water vessel on the Buddha shelf, and opened the little shrine before which they had been placed. Within were the ihai, the mortuary tablets of her people . . . [and a] scroll, inscribed with the spirit-names of many ancestors. Before that shrine, from her infancy, O-Dai had been wont to pray. The tablets and the scroll signified more to her faith in former time—very much more—than remembrance of a father’s affection and a mother’s caress; . . . those objects signified the actual viewless presence of the lost. . . . All this O-Dai ought to have known and remembered. Maybe she did; for she wept as she took the tablets and the scroll out of the shrine, and dropped them from a window into the river below.1